Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004)

 

Director: Richard Ayoade

Screenplay: Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness

Cast: Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi/Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D; Richard Ayoade as Dean Learner/Thornton Reed; Matt Berry as Todd Rivers/Dr. Lucien Sanchez; Alice Lowe as Madeleine Wool/Dr. Liz Asher

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/ An Abstract Candidate

 

I have never exploded. But I know what it would be like. Don't ask me how. I just know.

Garth Marenghi - author, visionary, dream weaver - is a prolific horror author, and in the eighties, he worked on a TV series which was never broadcast except for in Peru. That was until Channel 4 in 2004, desperate for content, asked him to resurrect the project, with new interviews with cast members who have not disappeared in the decades after. Breaking kayfabe, with the premise even sustained with the DVD released, is that Matthew Holness created Garth Marenghi originally in 2000, as part of a Richard Ayoade co-written horror parody stage show Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Brought to this series, he is a parody of the likes of Stephen King, who had his real Marenghi moment when he directed Maximum Overdrive (1986), and also the likes of Dean Koontz or James Herbert¹, fellow prolific horror authors. Marenghi is an egotist, a sexist, and has an episode of these six where he exposes his racism against the Scottish, the definition of a man with his head up his arse, thinking of himself as the messiah of horror who can even have profound insights to help humanity but is a tawdry author of terrible ideas and dialogue.

Darkplace itself is a disaster in terms of wooden acting, cheesy props and using slow motion to pad out episodes. A meta-textual work, the actual show is Marenghi directing himself and starring in the main role, as the former warlock Dr. Rick Dagless M.D at Darkplace Hospital, who with side characters encounter increasingly weird and horrifying events. Marenghi in the series-within-the-series was allowed to shoot interviews, mainly with his publisher Dean Learner (Richard Ayoade) who starred as Darkplace Hospital's administrator Thornton Reed too, and later on Todd Rivers (Matt Berry), an actor on the show that visibly became the stereotype of the older star reduced to drinking a lot. When I first saw Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I found it disappointing after all the build up. The episodes came off as slightly amusing but average altogether as I marathoned the entire series. A lot of the humour is the absurdity and ridiculousness of this set up, both Marenghi's ego, and the pastiche of a badly made horror series where he let his ego run wild, where he is shown as always cool and virtuous to the children in the wards, sexier than even Todd Rivers' heartthrob character, and always right. This time, I appreciated the show on its own terms, when the first scene introduces female lead Dr. Liz Asher (as played by Alice Lowe), who when starting at Darkplace Hospital is introduced to a cat, visibly placed on the hospital set by hands, telling her to "just leave!" in a dubbed over voice.

The show's structure could be a paradoxical one to work with; to create a technically awful programme could lead to making a dreadful show because it is too accurate to the dreariest of this type of programming. My initial issues with the show was that it was too deliberately broad, which leads to an ironic tone I found tedious at the time, growing when this became more common as a form of parody and becoming unbareable at the time onwards for a good few decades in cinema and television. With hindsight, I was too harsh on this, now that common trait has not become as prevalent. Though a version of this which fully depicted some of the strange programming coming from the likes of the BBC to ITV from the eighties would have been just as interesting for me, I just have remind myself I have seen some ridiculous special effects and incidents even in that type of programming which has won me over for their sincerely good parts. Then there are things, admittedly not a Dr. Who viewer but aware of this and seeing it with my own eyes, where you can have Bertie Bassett, the mascot of a British confectionary company, terrorised Dr. Who actor Sylvester McCoy in his sci-fi candy lab² and think that is the kind of insane moment you could have had in a hypothetical second series of Darkplace, if on a deliberately lower budget, and not bat an eye in standing out as too weird.

The central joke is established around how Garth Marenghi is clueless to how bad he is, and the six episodes we get are entirely focused on this, the first episode contrasting the madness of a man exploding into tiny pieces but Dagless still asking if he is all right afterwards. There are the scenes hastily put in to show Thornton Reed with a shotgun out-of-nowhere, in an entirely different field, when this man, the result of having tried practicing a demonic ritual with Dagless in the lunch hall, refuses to stay in his casket at the funeral, or how Reed himself is so wooden, to the point they have to shoot his scenes usually by himself even in two person conversations. A lot of my growing warmth to the series came from that initial negative reaction, developing a fondness for the production as time went on to its goofy tone as I thought about the series for a good few years, suddenly growing into a person who got the humour entirely. A lot of this is in mind that this is not trying in the premise to be a pitch-perfect parody of this type of television horror, which was the issue initially, but that this is exaggerated around Garth Marenghi's qualities as a creator being central to the joke. The one exception is where the final episode feels like Nigel Kneale's Quatermass mini-series if someone turned into alien broccoli rather than a blob. Instead, it is a very broad mash-up of medical soap opera and horror story where people being attacked by floating staplers, on noticeable strings, as in the second episode are so bad on purpose. The barebones nature of most of the episodes means you cannot really have a plot trajectory, so the humour has to come from the silliness. Also the interviews as integral to this punch line where the actors we have show their bad or misguided sides, such as how the cat somehow died on set or how two technicians died on the Scottish Mist episode, or how Dean Learner even hit a child for criticising how bad his dialogue is.

Cast wise, it is mainly the core four members who dominate the series barring a few surprise cameos, like Stephen Merchant or Julian Barratt as the hospital priest, emphasising that even before his role in Peter Strickland's bizarre horror film In Fabric (2018) Barratt could add gravitas even to the silliest of material, or add a much needed sense of absurdity to even serious material. Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi, both the writer and star, is interesting, and there are times he is lovably charming as he is actually indefensible, which makes the comedy work especially when it can lead to the abrupt reveal that they added comical amounts of slow motion to the second episode, where Liz goes on a rampage with her powers, or the Scottish Mist episode being about Dagless learning to overcome his intolerance to the Scottish only to expose, as he dodges the accusations of racism in his interview footage, that Marenghi shoot both feet off with his depictions of said Scottish. Richard Ayoade as his publicist hits the right tone and is a highlight - off the show he is a sleaze but in a subtle way that is funnier, whilst as the administrator of the Darkplace hospital, Ayoade inflects perfectly a man who cannot act. Matt Berry likewise hits to the right one too, as a hammy actor who adds w-e-i-g-h-t to his vocals in a way that's memorable, sounding like it is dubbed.

Sadly Alice Lowe as the sole female character is undercut by one of the major running gags, and is one of the moments where the show has flaws, in a show that does try for some social commentary in its humour, such as the final episode explicitly is a parody of terrible programming trying to metaphor AIDs is tasteless ways. The second episode especially, but throughout in her character's depiction, reflects how its author Marenghi has incredibly sexist dialogue and views of Dr. Liz Asher, playing her off as the simplistic female staff member, or in episode 2 going full-Carrie to the point people are menaced by furniture on string. It presents an issue especially as Lowe's character is later revealed to have disappeared, likely dead and buried in a random place in Eastern Europe. It is to the show's credit, whilst arguably the weakest episode, it was deflecting this sense of biting too hard at a difficult subject, sexism in older horror storytelling, with Marenghi coming off ridiculous from the get-go to get around this, as he is a dolt with very stupid ideas, and that we have Matt Berry in this episode having to fight off a homicidal egg whisk. My views on Darkplace have aged well due to seeing another parody of horror pulp, Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001), which is likely to one Steve Coogan project people may have forgotten even exists, where you had the issue of it parodying problematic issues of pulp fiction like Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, done with earnestness to still point out this was all racist as a joke but still having an actor in yellow face playing a Manchu pastiche to get the joke over. Episode two here is in the same issue of dealing with gender politics by having the sexism be so over-the-top, which may put people off or even just cause them to roll their eyes at the broadness of the pastiche, not actually dealing with the subject with enough to justify the satire and be comedy at the same time, so this does count as one of the weakest episodes if thankfully with a defter hand than Dr. Terrible.

Episode three clears the palette with probably the most eyebrow raising moment, a male patient being impregnated by an eye creature (with pixelated out genitals to the annoyance of Dean Learner) and immediately dying in childbirth conceiving an eyeball child. Here the humour of both the interviews and the story itself works, as Marenghi's obsession with never having male child but only four daughters, and a eulogy to a dead pet dog, are contrasted by Dagless' past trauma of losing his half-man half-grasshopper son which leaves him trying to protect a potentially dangerous eyeball child. Episode 4 imagines contaminated water turning the hospital into primordial ape people, effectively Planet of the Apes if with a bicycle chase final with an "apeazoid" that briefly turns into an episode of The Krypton Factor, a 1977-2010 game show which emphasises legitimate Mensa-like brain teasers, puzzles, and as the reference became evoked, an obstacle course with rope pulls as here.

By Episode 5, we get to the Scotch Mist, which is John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) if with kilter Scotsmen instead of pirate ghosts, who leave Scottish oats by their victims. Alongside the tangent about using high street bought batteries over cheap ones from markets, it is a story about overcoming prejudice but so prejudiced in the depiction, even subtitling the Scottish ghosts, it undercuts itself, Marenghi thinking Daglass can earn the name of true Scotsman by just apologising and appeasing the ghosts with shortbread. Episode 6 is the other time the series takes a risk in terms of more serious nods, being a tone deaf metaphor for the AIDs scare, which is explicitly talked of and is the one other time Darkplace is in danger of stumbling. Thankfully, it is also the story to contrast this which has the right balance of almost taking itself serious whilst being ridiculous to prevent this undercutting itself with the metatextual commentary taking too broad a scope on this subject. The humour found in Lucien Sanchez falling in love with a female patient slowly turning into alien broccoli due to a highly contagious mutation, that does feel like soap opera, Nigel Kneale and a healthy dose of sex humour in a blender prevents this issue of tackling a risky subject for satire because it is one of the stronger stories in its jokes. It allows Matt Berry more material to work with, which is for the better; it also has the one actual surprise where the episode abruptly turns into a synthpop music video for the character, and does one of the superior metatextual jokes in which a fight scene that breaks out, to save Lucien's life, was lost and had to be reconstructed from photos shot on the film set.

The first time I saw Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I thought it was a case of acquired taste, because I had always taken an issue to ironic humour at that point. Nowadays, this is not the case, and instead I wished there had been another series to just stretch this premise from that initial set-up, forcing it to have to take risks with the construct. Garth Marenghi never came back barring a cameo in Man to Man with Dean Learner (2006), an in-world talk show hosted by the Learner character which had Marenghi on as the first episode guest, and it would have been interesting to witness how the second series of Darkplace, having established the set-up, could have forced this broad parody into his own discomfort or stranger humour as we could elaborate on the premise of the Darkplace show, or in the interviews. Any more series beyond this might have capsized the premise and become that ironic-for-the-sake of irony I thought this show had, and even with its flaws as is, you would have lost the magic I finally appreciated after time to soak myself in Marenghi's dream weavings.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Ironic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

==========

1) Not in the slightest a knock against either man, but they are the apt comparison points for authors who commonly appearing second hand book stores in the United Kingdom, least in my neck of the woods, and how Herbert's blunt titles and covers does really evoke the absurd, crasser ones Marenghi's has as seen in the series.

2) Kandyman befittingly comes from the 1988 era of Dr. Who, emphasising how actual eighties television, though Darkplace is meant to be the early eighties, could really be as ridiculous as the parodies of that era.

Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai Season 1 (2013)

a.k.a. Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories

Director: Tomoya Takashima

Screenplay: Hiromu Kumamoto

Voice Cast: Kanji Tsuda as the Story teller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

The review linked to below comes with knowledge that, starting in 2013 and with more series being produced up to 2024 itself, Yamishibai may still continue into 2025 onwards. Taking the tradition of kamishibai, a form of paper play storytelling and theatre, and amalgamating it in a "micro-series" with urban legends, ghost tales and moments of general spooky misanthropy, it won me over. tIn mind that future series will even tie into cult cinema, with Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl (2008)) and Takashi Shimizu (the Ju-On/the Grudge franchise) getting involved from the second series onwards, and I cannot wait to get to the future series.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Vampire Princess Miyu (1988-89)

 

Director: Toshiki Hirano

Screenplay: Shō Aikawa

Based on the manga by Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi

(Voice) Cast: Naoko Watanabe/Anne Marie Zola (Manga UK dub)/Pamela Weidner as Miyu; Mami Koyama/Stephanie Griffin as Himiko Se; Kaneto Shiozawa/Zach Hanner as Larva

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

The personal project of its director Toshiki Hirano, as he is one of the co-creators of the source manga alongside his wife Narumi Kakinouchi, this definitely wins you over with its style and in terms of its melancholic tone. For the OVA anime period, it stands out for this, if with the issue like a lot of them that this feels slight for a premise which could have been taken further. This is emphasised when you know the original manga, not including the spin-offs, lasted from the year this anime was created to 2002.

Tellingly he would return to this in the late nineties for a full animated television series, but for what we got here, including the episode following the students being turned into marionettes which turned into the most successful story for its tone and emotional turns, I was glad to finally get around to this.

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

Beasts (1976)

 

Directors: Don Taylor, Richard Bramall, Don Leaver, Donald McWhinnie and John Nelson-Burton

Screenplay: Nigel Kneale

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Nigel Kneale is famous for the character of Bernard Quatermass, created for the sadly lost BBC TV production The Quatermass Experiment (1953), which only has the first episode still in existence. Thankfully, the two other TV productions have survived intact, as do the three Hammer adaptations of all three stories for cinema, and the 1979 Quatermass, a TV series closing off the character. Kneale worked on other projects too, and this one was originally for Associated Television (ATV), part of the Independent Television (ITV) network before ITV became the British channel it is in the current day. To avoid confusion, as I am too young to have grown up in this era when Beasts was first broadcast, ITV was for decades since its creation in 1955, the first commercial TV station in Britain, actually a network of separate television companies who shared programming as well as created television for different regions. Nowadays, barring Scotland and Northern Ireland having their own distinct regional differences, and programming like the news being focused on different regions, ITV has mostly conglomerated all its networks in itself and is divided by having additional numbered channels. Whilst ATV, who provided a service to the Midlands all week from 1968 to 1982, is no longer with us, Beasts lingered and developed a high reputation as a British horror television series, enticing the likes of myself to witness its six macabre tales as a one-off.

The programming of the episodes varies per version, but going from the DVD version that was used for this review, Baby opens the series, about an expecting young woman moving to a country cottage. Alarm bells should be heard when the cat is mewing like mad and runs away from the premises, not the last time an animal is not stupid enough to stay where danger is. The husband, who hated being a vet in the city, is headstrong and patronises her, the idea of her pregnancy affecting her emotions a gendered bias that she suffers through here, as he is impassioned by working with cattle now and in the countryside. When, in one of the walls they demolished, they find a strange desecrated corpse of an animal in a jar which is unlike anything either has seen, he thinks it is a fascinating item to show to his senior college than a warning of such a creepy entity even being in that wall in the first place. Kneale is known for nodding to folklore, such as how the most famous Quatermass story in either TV or Hammer film adaptation, Quatermass and the Pit, links old superstitions to aliens found under a London subway construction. In Baby, the female lead hears from the locals that the fields around her new home were notorious for something which caused cows to abort and chased people off using the area, with the suggestion the strange sheep-monkey creature in the jar as a supernatural tool for hexing people. All six episodes are TV production chamber pieces, having to work around not having elaborate special effects, and here, it is a psychological tale where the emphasis is on implicit fears barring the final practical effect. The lead being patronised as a pregnant woman is explicit as a theme, leading her to be isolated when an overtly supernatural end that explains the jar creature is fully formed.

Buddy-Boy for episode two is the more idiosyncratic tale, a weird tale that takes full advantage of the lack of practical effects and carefully chosen locations this story had used. This is about dolphins in the past tense, specifically the titular one of an old attraction long gone and now with the building being considered being bought by the new owners, who are running a club cinema to show porn. This reveals a surprise in its own as, whilst this series is not that violent and little cursing, this episode jars from the rest for how adult it is to the other five, in terms of the presentation of its story, but also scenes in an adult cinema with the decor not censored and even brief female nudity. It is not a detraction to bring this up, but instead as much part of the episode's distinct makeup, Buddy-Boy the most esoteric of the series but also the one dealing with some pretty heavy themes alongside these brief moments of edginess which do not feel tacked on. Dave (Martin Shaw), the one potential buyer who wants to keep a respectable business even with erotica, whilst his partner is even supposedly weighing the breasts of women he wants to get into porn films, is suspicious of how the owner of the building Hubbard (Wolfe Morris) is driven to drink and triggered by talk of Buddy-Boy. Buddy Boy was the rare American dolphin Hubbard acquired who started to rebel followed by the others starting to die when he did, not from disease or malnutrition but as if following him in rebellion.

When Dave encounters a woman strangely obsessed with Buddy-Boy and squatting secretly in the building, it is clear in his interactions with her and Hubbard to Dave that Hubbard "punished" Buddy-Boy and is haunted by him, wanting to get rid of the place ASAP. With a growing interest in the woman for her child-like love for Buddy-Boy, it is revealed he is using her to get Hubbard to sell the building to him cheaply, but Dave is becoming obsessed with what exactly happened to Buddy-Boy, initially for any dodgy dealings in Hubbard's past but finding himself dragged into this strange psychodrama. Most of the story is entirely a drama, barring the touch that in the building where Buddy-Boy died, disembodied dolphin sounds are heard and they are not inside just the woman's head as Dave hears them too. Including its bleak ending, where her mind is entirely for Buddy-Boy even when Dave tries to love her as a romantic figure, Buddy-Boy is the oddest episode and the one which is going to divide viewers. For me, it is one of the better episodes because of this.

A great episode immediately arriving afterwards, The Dummy is set on a horror film production, a period chillier about a giant bog-pig monster. A follow up to a series of Dummy films that has not had a sequel in a long while, a female film journalist writing of the production arrives when the actor in the suit, Clyde (Bernard Horsfall) is struggling emotionally - his wife has run off with the actor in a smaller role, and taken their daughter too, during Clyde's out-of-work period. The director was unaware of their bad blood, and the production is falling off the rails as this is revealed, forcing the producer, Clive Swift, to be called in. A stalemate transpires - the other actor refuses to leave his small role, but the costume was designed for only Clyde - and it is when the journalist gives the producer the idea, when talking of Clyde imbuing the Dummy costume with his personality like a ritualistic mask, to get Clyde drunk and riff on this idea. It proves too effective, and Clyde as the Dummy beast murders an extra in a scene and goes mad, continuing on with an episode that is really good.

In general, the series after its first episode, which is just a nice start, is consistently strong as with episode four, Special Offer, in which we follow a meek female employee of a supermarket, hassled by her male superior. Unfortunately compared to the other young female employee, who he is clearly having a relationship with, this is Carrie-adjacent though explicitly linked to the concept of poltergeists tapping into the emotional energy of people, as this meek younger woman dismissed as ugly and dumb by her colleagues, Noreen (Pauline Quirke), is effecting the strange circumstances happening the store, like cans of food rolling by their own will, or eventually actually destruction of the produce. What she calls after the mascot of the store's own brand, and possibly seen as a rat infestation at first, becomes far more unnatural as this progresses, with her bullying lead wanting to initially fire her, stoking the flames. When her emotional state is told to him by his senior, who has to accept the unnatural as part of the issues as a regular crisis in a store as matter-of-fact, to be effected by her crush on him, this puts him and his wandering eye against the mill stone.

Episode five, What Big Eyes, has the added star power of Patrick Magee, a North Irish actor many will likely know for his small but iconic role in A Clockwork Orange (1971), or in a variety of other places from Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), to even a Lucio Fulci horror film partially shot in England, The Black Cat (1981). Inspector Curry (Michael Kitchen) is a new RSCPA officer, the real life group using those initials to represent the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and is eventually brought into Magee's experiments after the set up. Adamant to protect animals, Curry even ends up reading the records of an animal merchant he feels is suspicious, only to be surprised when Hungarian and Romania timber wolves are being sent to a tiny pet shop in town. He suggests to the pet shop owner herself, McGee's daughter, his suspicion someone is using their store name as a front for illegal animal smuggling but she, living absolutely devoted to her father without ever having her own life and being mocked by him, is complicit to his experiments which used the wolves. Magee is dubbed by Curry's senior officer as a crackpot scientist who believed Darwin got it wrong about evolution, and between being a specialist in lycanthropy and the title's Red Riding Hood reference, with his creation a "Grandma vaccine", it is clear what the episode is hinting at. The episode's decision to be very subjective of how this vaccine works, as Magee is using it on himself, becomes one of the best strengths of a strong episode.

Episode six, During Barty's Party, ends this series on a perfectly gruesome note, in which an older couple slowly grow paranoid in their house at night. The opening sets up that another couple, who were necking in the fields, are being attacked by some unknown form off-screen which the central female lead initially thinks is from a dream. The husband initially dismisses this as all her nerves, his pride felt when a rat is found under the floorboards of their home and refusing to be swallowed even when the situation becomes direr. However, as the radio tells them, there is supposedly a rat migration transpiring in the thousands on the march. Barty of the title is the unseen host of the radio show that plays through the story. Whilst there is one use of the word "retarded" which has not aged well, he is not dissimilar to modern hosts with their wisecracks and playfully goofy, which adds a nicely grim edge as, in-between a real pop song they licensed and the fake ads, he initially dismisses the rat migrations as more rats are heard under the central couples' floors. The additional touch, relevant to the time period but still disturbing, is a take on how species naturally adapt to resist poisons, only in this case the wife theorising the rats may have also developed a consciousness awareness of the humans who created the poisons and desired revenge. Without spoiling this episode, it is a macabre end to an insanely good anthology series. It comes with the knowledge that, just in the seventies alone when this one-off series came out, Kneale was also writing the likes of The Stone Tape (1972), so this was part of a decades' long strong career from that point between the fifties to the eighties, one where this would be a grand piece for any writers' career in television and film, but one of many that cemented his reputation.  

Hellsing (2001–2002)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

For a tangent, I return back to an anime series I had not seen until the 2000s when I got into the medium. Naturally, there was nostalgia in this one case, as the likes of the original Hellsing come from a specific period of anime which I got into by the mid-2000s and no longer exists. ADV Films, who released this in the United Kingdom, no longer existed by the end of the decade due to financial problems, and Gainax, the divisive anime studio who produced this, were a prolific studio whose titles came out at the time I was getting into anime, and also suffered from severe financial problems by the end of the decade too. They still exist, but they are not the same big budget studio who divided people in terms of the quality of their work. This was also the era, for whatever bizarre reason, someone thought releasing three to four episodes a DVD disc, at full price as separate releases, was a good idea until sanity prevailed and we just got box sets.

Hellsing is an action horror about a secret group of vampire hunters in England, with the really cool choice to cast actual British voice actors (or try for proper regional accents) in a rare moment of English dub acting where, even notoriously as with certain Manga Entertainment dubs, even British recording productions pretended to have American accents. The issue comes with the knowledge this was the "original" adaptation of the source manga. Gainax, as the review gets into, were seemingly cursed with an inability get stories properly finished, and this one was struggled worse because said manga had barely started with material yet to reach when the show was in production. It tries its hardest with wrapping together the plot threads already there into a new story and having to bring in new series only content. Sadly, one of the most interesting inclusions in terms a new villain, for a 2000s production, touches on problematic stereotypes in horror fiction of African mysticism, and it still struggles by its end. Now it also has been entirely wiped from the slate due to Hellsing Ultimate, a more faithful adaption for straight to video which had a high budget, the manga fully to work from, and didn't need to censor the gore whatsoever for television.

The virtues are here, least in style, and I learnt a long time ago, I can find things to appreciate even in really bad anime, but this is exactly the reason, for all the things I think are great, I don't believe in having nostalgia. I would rather return to these productions of my memories as new again, strike that nostalgia dead, and find virtues even in a work like this I admit has huge crippling flaws.

For the full review, follow the blog link here.

Le Portrait de Petit Cossette (2004)

 

Director: Akiyuki Simbo

Screenplay: Mayori Sekijima

Voice Cast: Marina Inoue as Cossette d'Auvergne; Mitsuki Saiga as Eiri Kurahashi; Kumiko Yokote as Hatsumi Mataki; Megumi Toyoguchi as Shouko Mataki; Rei Igarashi as Zenshinni of Shakado; Ikumi Fujiwara as Michiru Yajiri; Isao Yamagishi as Hiroshi Hakuta; Junpei Morita as Yukata Enokido; Mamiko Noto as Yuu Saiga; Masashi Ebara as Marchello Orlando; Shinnosuke Furumoto as Michio Hisamoto; Susumu Chiba as Naoki Katou; Yukari Tamura as Kaori Nishimoto

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

As covered in the review linked to below, view Le Portrait de Petit Cossette as an interpretation of a troupe of Gothic horror, of a figure obsessed with a figure they are romantically linked to from beyond the dead, if interpreted through a hyper stylised three-part anime from a director with a career before and especially after with an elaborate eye for stylisation. Think of this as the pulpier, more bombastic take on Rebecca (1940) with genre tropes of Japanese animation and interpreting horror through action beats.

 

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

The World YAMIZUKAN (2017)

 

Director: Noboru Iguchi

Screenplay: Noboru Iguchi, Oolongta Yoshida, Takashi Iizuka and Uuronta Yoshida

Voice Cast: Takumi Saitou as the Storyteller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

The really obvious aspect, if surprising thing to learn of, that needs to be brought up is that the director is that Noboru Iguchi behind The Machine Girl (2008), who has been a collaborator with the studio behind this micro-series a few times, studio ILCA. The Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories franchise is one of their longest (and ongoing) works, over multi series adapting short horror stories told in a way based on the kamishibai method of story-telling, street storytellers who used illustrated miniature stages, with YAMIZUKAN being very much the more explicitly inspired by Western (especially American) horror tropes. The best way to approach this series too, for the best experience, is to not try to take it all  seriously, as some of the plot twists in this work are clearly ridiculous on purpose. Still gleefully macabre, there are however times where this feels like a send-up on the genre, and to those who can appreciate even the plot twists that come out of nowhere, this will be a worthwhile experience just in terms of the experimentation in the varying animation and illustration styles brought in too. Even live action to really catch viewers off guard.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Demon Prince Enma (2006-7)

 

Director: Mamoru Kanbe

Screenplay: Takao Yoshioka

Based on the manga by Go Nagai

Voice Cast: Yukitoshi Tokumoto as Enma; Saeko Chiba as Yukihime; Setsuji Satoh as Kapaeru; Yūichi Nagashima as Grandpa Chapeauji

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Crossover

 

I will admit I was a little disappointed by Demon Prince Enma, but because there was a lot of promise here still worth seeing. This is an adaptation of a Go Nagai work which has varied in tone over the decades, from morbid but family friendly kids show to lewd reinterpretations, taken seriously in a favourite trope of mine, supernatural figures having to deal with cases of the week, which has the interesting take that these figures baring the kappa are mostly clueless to the modern world. It also helps this has Mamoru Kanbe in the director's seat, an unsung figure for horror anime where, even if you do not like them all, he has made interesting work from the best of this to Elfen Lied (2004) in the genre for anime, and this has enough to further that opinion of mine. My disappointment comes, ironically, from when this tries in a short time scale to be a complete narrative. For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)

 

Director: Toshio Hirata

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Matsuri Akino

(Voice) Cast: Masaya Onosaka as Leon Orcot; Toshihiko Seki as Count D; Hiroshi Yanaka as Mr. Hayward; Kouji Tsujitani as Robin Hendrix; Miho Yamada as Q-Chan; Miki Itō as Louise; Mitsuaki Madono as Roger Stanford; Mitsuru Miyamoto as Kelly Vincent; Narumi Hidaka as Nancy; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as the Kirin; Satsuki Yukino as Jill; Sayuri Yoshida as Alice; Sho Hayami as Jason Grey

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

Among the many anime adaptations of horror manga I wish had lasted longer, as a one off four episode television production, Pet Shop of Horrors is a good example. An anthology series all centered around a supernatural pet shop, these four tales of “be careful what you wish for” fully commit to bleak endings and introspection as the choices made by the customers with their pets, always breaking the contracts, cause pause for thought as much as means Count D, our ethereal (and cake loving) androgynous anti-hero, is technically not culpable if anyone dies for breaking the rules that Gremlins also warned of in not feeding the mogwai after midnight. This original manga still continued over multiple series, but sadly the anime did not, in real need of another adaptation down the line to expand these tales.

For the full review, follow the link here.

Stephen King's Rose Red (2002)

 

Director: Craig R. Baxley

Screenplay: Stephen King

Cast: Nancy Travis as Dr. Joyce Reardon, Matt Keeslar as Steve Rimbauer, Melanie Lynskey as Rachel "Sissy" Wheaton, Kimberly J. Brown as Annie Wheaton, Judith Ivey as Cathy Kramer, Matt Ross as Emery Waterman, Julian Sands as Nick Hardaway, Emily Deschanel as Pam Asbury, Kevin Tighe as Victor "Vic" Kandinsky, David Dukes as Dr. Carl Miller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Well, I’ve never heard Glen Miller out of a flower before.

Unlike other Stephen King adaptations, this is not actually adapting one of the legendary author’s stories to the screen, but is an entirely original tale King himself wrote the screenplay of. This one has some history, in which in the nineties he had pitched a haunted house story to Steven Spielberg, remaking The Haunting (1963), the legendary horror film adapted from Shirley Jackson’s seminal novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959)¹. Spielberg would produce the 1999 remake of The Haunting, whilst here King’s original idea would finally find its form in an entirely original story, a four plus hour mini-series, directed by former stunt man, former stunt coordinator, and the director of Stone Cold (1991), an action movie attempting to launch the film career of American football player Brian Bosworth. Craig R. Baxley would become a regular director of Stephen King mini-series during the 2000s, there is nothing but playful humour in the later reference.

Effectively this does reimaging Jackson’s seminal supernatural novel and original version of The Haunting, if by way of influences in real life. One clear influence is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. Alongside stories of the mansion being haunted, it was also a building Sarah Winchester had constantly under construction, building mazes and weird unconventional additions to the building which it can be legitimately possible to get lost within.

A college professor Dr. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis), with a very liberal attitude to the paranormal, is self funding an expedition to Rose Red, the equivalent to the Winchester House but with a significantly larger body count in its tragic history, and absolutely the example of something so evil you should just torch the place rather than enter it. Deciding regardless of the risk to collect together a group of psychics, she wishes to prove ghosts exists with what eventually develops into the maddened zeal of Captain Ahab and a white whale. Among the psychics brought into the manor is Annie (Kimberly J. Brown), who gets a prologue introducing her, who is a trope in King’s work, that of figures with disabilities or significant ostracization in society possessing unnatural abilities. As someone born with autism myself, I was concerned – with childhood memories of Dreamcatcher (2003), a notorious King adaptation for the silver screen where, alongside “shit weasels”, there was Duddits, a disabled character with unnatural abilities which was broadly dealt even from the perspective as a younger viewer. This was more so the case here as Annie is explicitly depicted as autistic here and could be a misfire. Thankfully it is not the case – she would be on the more severe spectrum in difficulty in communication, not directly communicating with people, acts of repetition which even I do which offer comfort or pure enjoyment (her obsession with Glen Miller, to rearranging dominos, which do not come off as broad. As a character among some broad (and questionable) stereotypes, she comes off well. Even when characters start making more crueler comments on her, as a person who would need to be in care even if her paranormal abilities are more advanced, it comes from when feces hits the fan and it comes clear. As someone ultra-gifted to the point she can rain stones from the sky, placing her into Rose Red, which can use her, was like bringing a nuclear missile to Godzilla, so the tone does not feel insulting but contextually when other characters start to lose it and others have already died.

The broadness of some of the characters here is an issue in other cases. Among the psychics is Emery (Matt Ross), whose pre-cognitive warnings from ghosts about Rose Red are useless when he has all the bills to pay from his mother’s overspending, even if you leave the fridge a bloodbath. His mother herself is a broad take on the domineering mother which you can accuse as being a tasteless stereotype, the large figured and overprotective stereotype with no real point to her but to be a grotesque domineering stereotype. Rather than say, for a good example, what “mother” is to Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), this plays to stereotypes of ugliness which have not aged well. You will also have the surprise that, with an arsehole stereotype of a rational skeptic in Dr. Carl Miller (David Dukes), a fellow professor who wishes to bump Dr. Reardon off her tenure for her “irrational” believe in ghosts, King punts a figure totally opposite for what he has done with Christian zealots. Some may be angry about him, but let us be blunt, Marcia Gay Harden’s Christian fundamentalist in The Mist (2007), one of the more acclaimed King adaptations from the 2000s, was also a broad one-dimensional stereotype, but with the unfortunate reality that too many Christians are terrible examples of their faith, making it more digestible to kick them in the gonads in horror films for many as they are more frequently a problem in modern politics and culture. It posits, the more of King’s work I have grow up with, a family collecting the films and mini-series, and reading his work, that the author just despises holier than thou figures of all types, authority for him delusional, especially as, initially sympathetic, the Captain Ahab comparison is perfect for Dr. Joyce Reardon. He is entirely sympathetic to the psychics themselves, all likable and with real powers among those here, but Reardon’s hair trigger temper on the subject of the supernatural warns that, wanting to prove it, she will sacrifice people and eventually be burnt by the supernatural fire she wishes to claim. King follows a well worn trope in horror, a good one, of the dangers of acquiring unnatural knowledge without realizing the respect and risk than entails with the occult.

The mini-series is a broad, brash haunted house metaphorically, not subtle in the slightest and spooky like a jaunted spooky train ride in four plus hours, split over three parts originally. Aptly the setting is cool, like a great haunted house, including its influence from the Winchester Mystery House in some of the more unconventional sets built, such as an upside down room or the tiny model version of Rose Red in the lounge. A shame is felt that they could have lent on the optical illusions of the location, even on a TV mini-series budget, especially as one of the aspects that Rose Red has is its ability to expand and change rooms to trap victims. A lot of the first half, taking a part before even getting to Rose Red, is bringing up the back-story of the home, which becomes more a nicely ghoulish series of disappearances, deaths and a man choking to death on an apple. Even if there is some violence, and severed fingers, the lack of gore, and only a subtle nod to the morbid and decayed, feels like an actual haunted amusement attraction, especially as the mini-series is ambitious (despite the seams being visible) in using unsubtle CGI for evil statures or bees. The difference is that, as a story, it is a spooky movie allowed to be more fleshed out in its longer length, and that this is a haunted house ride where you get to go with Julian Sands, the British actor arguably the highlight as a likable English psychic who takes to the environment with common sense and white.

In terms of King works, adaptations or original ones, the broad strokes in characterization and wishing to have a complete lack of subtlety in the premise, neither next to The Haunting or the Shirley Jackson source material, are not going to leave it as appealing to the more acclaimed adaptations. The Shining (1980) this is not, and infamous King hated that adaptation and a 1997 TV mini-series properly told the source novel, so what he considers the appropriate tone for a story of a haunted house may not appeal to everyone. Personally there was a lot of fun for me here, in mind to that comparison to a literal haunted house ride than a profound psychodrama.

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1) Stephen King's Rose Red Was Originally A Remake Of The Haunting, written by Michael Kennedy and published for Screen Rant on March 5th 2021.

Doomed Megalopolis (1991-2)

Director: Rintaro

Screenplay: Akinori Endō, Masayuki and Rintaro

Based on the novel Teito Monogatari by Hiroshi Aramata

Voice Cast: Masaaki Okabe as the Narrator, Kouichi Yamadera as Jun'ichi Narutaki, Kyuusaku Shimada as Yasunori Kato, Gorou Naya as Yasumasa Hirai, Kan Tokumaru as Dr. Makoto Nishimura, Kaneto Shiozawa as Youichirou Tatsumiya, Keiko Han as Yukari Tatsumiya, Ken Yamaguchi as Kamo, Kenichi Ogata as Shigemaru Kuroda, Kouichi Kitamura as Junkichi Amano, Naoki Tatsuta as Torahiko Terada, Osamu Saka as Viscount Eiichi Shibusawa, Takaya Hashi as Noritsugu Hayakawa, Youko Asagami as Keiko Tatsumiya, Yuusaku Yara as Shigeyuki "Rohan Kouda" Kouda

A 1000 Anime Crossover/A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Starting a series of Teito Monogatari reviews over this season, Doomed Megalopolis is the animated adaptation, one of the most explicit in the supernatural and adult content, and a fest for the eyes in terms of anime's phantasmagorical content. For all the years I had only heard of this as infamous for its content, rather than its virtues, it was a huge surprise to watch.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Ghost Talker's Daydream (2004)

 

Director: Osamu Sekita

Screenplay: Katsumasa Kanazawa and Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on the manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro

(Voice) Cast: Masumi Asano as Misaki Saiki; Tomokazu Sugita as Souichiro Kadotake; Yukari Tamura as Ai Kunugi; Daisuke Kishio as Mitsuru Fujiwara

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) / A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

"This anime adaptation had always been one of interest for me because I was a fan of the source manga. Found discounted in a British bookstore, the source manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro, whose work was adapted into Twilight of the Dark Master (1997), an obscure Akiyuki Shinbo helmed horror OVA. It is also lurid, about an albino dominatrix named Saiki Misaki who, in-between her sex worker career which also includes writing for a porno magazine, is using her ability to see and communicate with ghosts to help a branch of the local government exorcise buildings and environments. The source manga is violent, sexually explicit and sleazy, and tackles subjects like sexual violence. It was also however a work which looked exceptional, with the illustrations by Meguro, and had managed to be the right side of lurid by being smarter, building a world whose images could be ghoulish as much as it played to sex comedy. Sadly, published by Dark Horse, they only got to volume six before the series was cancelled for English language release, never continued up past through the remaining four volumes, and managing to end on the worse cliff-hanger as well to emphasis this fact involving a haunted apartment complex..."

The anime, as the review gets into, does not sell the manga well. It is lurid, very lurid, and suffers from the fact it scrapes the surface of the material, not the most interesting content, and struggles from its clear lower budget next to the source material's art. It is also, however, an adaptation I had always been curious of, and as a fan of what little of the source material got an English translation, I have to admit there was enough here to appreciate. It is absolutely a manga, not only one I wish had its entire run available, which needed a better adaptation if you could snap your fingers and unleash it.

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

Children of the Stones (1977)

 

Created by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray

Director: Peter Graham Scott

Screenplay: Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray

Cast: Gareth Thomas as Adam; Veronica Strong as Margaret; Peter Demin as Matthew; Ruth Dunning as Mrs. Crabtree; Iain Cuthbertson as Hendrick; Katharine Levy as Sandra; Freddie Jones as Dai

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Make it a sherbet butty.

The main theme by music composer Sidney Sager - a breathless chorus of voices - is enough in its distinctness and unnerving form to signpost Children of the Stones, this unsettling ethereal theme to be heard as the main motif and the opening credits piece for all seven episodes of this West HTV Production. Sidney Sager - whose filmography is smaller than I would have presumed but does include episodes of The World About Us (1967-1987), a documentary series about geography, anthropology, and natural history subjects, befitting the tone of this series - did have an extensive career as a composer and conductor, so thankfully his work would have been appreciated in other mediums, here making his mark among many people here in Children of the Stones being a very rewarding dip into British supernatural television from the past.

For clarification, HTV Production is tied to ITV which, launched in 1955 as Independent Television, is a cultural landmark for television anyone from the United Kingdom. Everyone has grown up with unless born before 1955. ITV is the oldest commercial network in the UK, and wishing to let any non-British readers of this review have some context, they became for the early years of television the first big rival for the BBC. They were also a network of separate companies which provided regional television services and also shared programmes between each other to be shown on the entire network, which is where West HTV Production comes in. Eventually they became ITV Wales & West, until December 31st 2013, and thus afterwards being separated into ITV Cymru Wales for Wales and ITV West Country covering the both the West of England sub-region and South West England¹.

The broadcasting area was divided into two sub-regions, Wales and the West of England, which is apt as Children of the Stones, whilst set in the made up community of Milbury, is shot in Avebury, Wiltshire, one of the locations covered in their broadcasting at the time. This series would have been broadcast across the country beyond HTV Production, unleashing this unconventional mini-series that, whilst a fantasy story with sci-fi edges, is befittingly dread inducing like a horror story. The "stones" is a stone circle, fifty three, part of the small village of Milbury, where astrophysics professor Adam (Gareth Thomas) and his son Matthew (Peter Demin) are to stay there for three months, part of the father's research on this pagan formation. The stones are the Avebury stone circle, viewed to have been built between 2850 BC and 2200 BC, and seen in this mini-series in aerial shots as a huge circular stone circle which in turn encloses two smaller stone circles². Originally 100 stones², there is an argument it is a worship place, but exists in the same way as Stonehenge, a legendary location further in Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, as an ancient heritage site whose origins and reasons behind it are mysterious, befitting Children of the Stones' esoteric narrative flourishes. Since these incredible ancient monuments exist, why not use them onscreen too?

The entire plot stems from Matthew finding a painting of a stone circle involving a Pagan ritual and a light in the centre from the sky. The painting is enough to cause the elder female maid at the home they are living in to faint, but considering the landlord, and head of the village Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson), is encouraging both to stay longer, Milbury is an immediately suspicious place. When the term "happy one" and "unhappy one" are used by even by the kids, it is a sign this community is strange, clearly a village of aliens or brain washing with regular people the dwindling minority, where even the classrooms are divided into high level mathematics and forcing the "normals" and the farm boys with simpler sums. What it is, where the locals can just disappear on nights leaving the newcomers alone, is knee deep into the esoteric fortean culture popular at the time, alongside what would become "hauntology" decades after in British pop culture from this time having an uneasiness stemming from the combination of the urban and the rural in our island country. The centre of fifty three ley lines, it is a place of astrological connections, a supernova in the time before Christ documented in Milbury, with a black hole where it is and where the rocks are pointed. Here we are in Pagan versus modern cultural territory, a bear cult in the past around this place and psionic powers involved, which Matthew develops after a glancing touch of one of the stones.

Children of the Stones does evoke fear of conformity; specifically the notion of village life, where everyone knows everyone, as a virtue is undercut, instead posing the chilling idea of everyone being without their real selves, with the juxtaposition of the metropolises in the leads being outsiders against this rural place. The thing I have not mentioned until now is that this is a show made for children, whilst makes Children of the Stones even more interesting as, barring some dialogue and exposition which is heavy handed, this never talks down to its target audience and has all this eerie content which is just as distinct for a viewer of any age group. The creators and writers Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray deserve their credit as everyone on and off-screen do. Jeremy Burnham was as much a prolific actor in television and film as a writer, whilst Trevor Ray was more of an actor, with only three credits to his writing career - this, another ITV mini-series Raven (1977), another children's show dealing with Arthurian legends which he worked with Jeremy Burnham for, and an unaccredited hand in The Ambassadors of Death: Episode 1, a Doctor Who episode. It is hilarious that Morris dancing, the most innocuous of folk traditions, is held as a sign of being brainwashed, but for a children's show to scrutinise the notion of an idealised rural community life, the "good old days" concept, as being a sign of being docile and without emotion, is a sticking point for the better, knowing this is family entertainment offering the notion, when we learn the secret of the village, that removing all sadness and permanent happiness is itself controlling.

The smartness of the show, working around its style, is really rewarding. Like a lot of British television dramas from this time, there are stage set interior scenes but a lot of on-location exterior ones, having to work around some aged effects but mostly a dialogue driven show with a creepy edge. The cast is full of people who would have been prolific at the time in various mediums, which includes the delightful appearance of Freddie Jones as Dai, a poacher and one of the few "normals" who has stuck around for a long time in the village, Jones' legacy as much for the likes of David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) and it is the ITV soap opera Emmerdale.

The music from Sidney Sager, the one main theme, really does enough in itself to being discomforting, and there are plenty of macabre and openly odd touches to the story. People turn into stone and/or die, and you cannot leave Milbury because, not only does it exist within a protective barrier, but is revealed to exist in its own time zone. Some of the content which is of its era, proudly sticking itself into the fascination with esotericism from the time, may be eyebrow raising for some viewers, but alongside the matter-of-factness the show has for it, taking it serious, but this is in mind to the period it was made. That, being between the British and the North Americans, if not anywhere else, the seventies if rife with the occult and the unexplained as pop cultural fascinating, this screening on television at a time Uri Geller would have already been famous for the likes of bending spoons with his mind and already being challenge by the likes of James Randi, alongside a lot of strange films from the era in the occult and horror which helped created the future Hauntology interest. This fully embraces psychometric themes including psychic powers, which as it is told sincerely is more rewarding than cheesy.

It also has a rare example of a father and son relationship with the leads, and with actors Gareth Thomas and Peter Demin, it is a good one. Matthew, barring his eccentric humour in eating bizarre combinations of fillings for sandwiches, transgressing the savoury and sweet food lines, is a teenager who is as smart as his father, who is neither played as a dolt. This is a horror story where they manage to outsmart the villain with something actually clever - using science to manipulate the clocks in their favour - and this intelligence, or least the sense of letting the characters being alert and act sensibly in this increasingly perverse village, is a huge virtue to Children of the Stones. It is a good show, a sci-fi thriller which does touch horror in its own way, telling even its more unconventional aspects straight faced, as serious drama which never drags over its seven episodes less than thirty minutes each, succeeding as a result .

 

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1) ITV Cymru Wales news shake-up under new Ofcom licence, written by Huw Thomas for BBC.co.uk and published on July 23rd 2013

2) A small biography of Avebury for the English Heritage website.